On Harrison Barnes

My girlfriend is a UNC alumna, and she is not what you would call a huge basketball fan. Sure, she was on Franklin Street after the Tar Heels won each of their national championships. And yeah, she did love Sean May. But she certainly could not pick the Wear twins out of a crowd, and when we recently saw Marcus Ginyard at a restaurant, the best she could do was, “Hey, that guy plays for Carolina!”

But this weekend, she looked at me and asked, “Are you jelly that UNC signed Harrison Barnes?”

So yeah, losing out on Barnes was kind of a big deal.

But that doesn’t mean that missing out on Barnes was Coach K’s fault. It doesn’t mean that North Carolina head coach Roy Williams is a better recruiter than Mike Krzyzewski—or, as one of my friends put it, that “Roy continues to eat K’s lunch.” It doesn’t mean that recruits don’t think Duke is cool. It doesn’t mean that the Tar Heels are the new dominant team in the country.

All it means is that one kid decided he wanted to go to UNC over Duke.

To a certain extent, recruiting appears to be like trying to convince someone you met in a bar to go home with you. Except this would be the case only if bar scenes were always characterized by rich old men pursuing very tall and athletic high school boys while thousands of other old men broke down the rich old men’s strategies on the Internet and tried to guess which rich old man the tall, athletic young boy would sleep with. The presence of the pursuer and the pursued makes it tempting to compare recruiting to hooking up. Doing this enables one to say things like “Coach K isn’t cool enough to score top talent” and “Coach K can’t close.”

Only, this is kind of a silly comparison because recruiting is not at all like trying to close the deal on a Friday evening. Trying to hook up requires that the pursuer convinces the pursued that he is worth spending one night with. Trying to get a recruit to come to your school requires the coach to convince the player that he’s worth spending at least one year (and possibly four) working without pay. In that sense, it’s less like hooking up and more like actual real-world dating. When we think about it like that, the analogical phrases we’d use are “Those two just couldn’t make it work” and “They weren’t right for each other.”  

That’s what happened: Harrison Barnes and Duke just were not right for each other.  

Perhaps most importantly, Krzyzewski could tell Barnes that if he came to Duke he could be the next Grant Hill, but he could never promise him that he’d be the next Michael Jordan.

I’m sure Coach K did his best to get Barnes, just like he does his best to get every kid that he thinks would be a good fit for his program. But Barnes thought UNC was a better fit. Other kids, faced with the same choice, have picked Duke—Josh McRoberts (the second-ranked player in his class) is the most recent example—and, in the future, kids will pick Duke again.  

Of course, Barnes actually made the wrong choice, but maybe that’s just the sour grapes talking.